Valorant is designed to run on modest hardware, so FPS problems are usually a settings or background-process issue rather than a hardware ceiling — unless you’re on genuinely old hardware, in which case a graphics card upgrade will matter more than any setting.

In-game settings that matter most

  • Material Quality — set to Low. This has one of the biggest performance impacts of any setting.
  • Texture Quality — has a small FPS impact but a large VRAM impact; set to Medium if you have 4GB+ VRAM.
  • Detail Quality / UI Quality — set to Low; these add visual clutter more than they add clarity.
  • Anti-Aliasing — set to None or MSAA 2x. Higher settings cost more FPS than they’re worth competitively.
  • VSync — turn off, for the lower-latency reasons in the FAQ above.
  • NVIDIA Reflex / Reduce Buffering — enable if available; it targets input latency, not raw FPS, but pairs well with a high frame rate.

System-level changes

  1. Update your GPU driver. Outdated drivers are a common, easily-fixed cause of inconsistent frame times.
  2. Set Windows’ power plan to High Performance (or Balanced with a pinned max CPU state) so the CPU isn’t downclocking during matches.
  3. Close background apps that use GPU or CPU — browsers with many tabs and overlay apps (chat clients, recording software) are common offenders.
  4. Check your storage isn’t full. Windows and Valorant both perform worse when the system drive is nearly out of space.

When settings aren’t enough

If you’ve applied the above and FPS is still below your monitor’s refresh rate, the bottleneck is likely your CPU or GPU generation rather than a setting. Our FPS Calculator gives a rough estimate of what your current hardware should be capable of, and our setup guides cover budget-conscious upgrade paths if a hardware change turns out to be the right move.